Post # 23-Meditation as advocated in Buddhist Practice- Part 2
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this Blog for the first time? It would be good if you could check out the
archives and read the 1st Post
to know about this Blog before reading on.
We saw in Post 22 a brief introduction to
Buddhist Meditation and extracts from teachings of some learned Meditation
teachers and practitioners. In this post we will look at some more of such
references made by other learned teachers. So continuing on with the quotes
from Meditation teachers:-
ix. The meditation teacher -Joseph Goldstein
co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society USA in his talk on Guided Meditation
on Mindfulness says- “Explore the
practice of Vippasana or insight meditation for awakening. These
meditations are rooted in one discourse of the Buddha- The Satipattana Sutta,
the four ways of establishing mindfulness”
He quotes the Buddha in the Sutta as “This is the direct path for the purification of beings; for the
surmounting of sorrow; for the disappearance of pain and grief; for attainment
of a true way for the realization of Nibbana”…. “Given the magnitude and
importance by these declarations, Buddha has placed a great value on Meditation”.
He says therefore that- “the quality of
mind it refers to has tremendous transforming power in our lives”.
x. Ven.
Mahasi Sayadaw the meditation teacher/monk from Myanmar in his book on
‘Fundamentals of Vippassana
Meditation’ says- “There are two kinds of
meditation; meditation to develop calm and meditation to develop insight. The
forty subjects described in the Visuddhi Magga (the Pali Commentary) develop
calm and concentration. Out of these forty subjects only respiration meditation
and analysis of elements has to do with insight. If you want insight you will
have to work further.
On the question on how we develop insight- the answer is by
meditating on the five aggregates of grasping. The mental and material
qualities inside beings are aggregates of grasping. They may be grasped with
delight by craving or grasped wrongly by wrong views. You have to meditate on
them to see them as they really are; otherwise you grasp them with craving and
wrong views. Once you see them as they really are, you no longer grasp them.
This is the way to develop insight”.
xi. Ven. Ajahn Chah the Thai monk of the
‘forest monk’ tradition in his talk on Meditation says – “Seekers of goodness, please listen in peace. Listening to the Dhamma
in peace means to listen with a one-pointed mind, paying attention to what you
hear and then letting go… While listening to the Dhamma we are encouraged to
firmly establish both body and mind in Samadhi. Why you are gathered here to
practice meditation is because your hearts and minds do not understand what
should be understood. When we know our own mind, when there is Sati to look
closely at the mind there is wisdom”.
xii. S N Goenka (Jee) the Vipssana teacher from India, in his book on, The Art of Living,
says – “All of us seek peace and harmony,
because this is what we lack in our lives. We all want to be happy; we regard
it as our right. Yet happiness is a goal we strive towards more often than
attain it. At times we all experience dissatisfaction in life- agitation,
irritation, disharmony, and suffering. Even if at this moment we are free from
such dissatisfactions, we can all remember a time when they afflicted us and
can foresee a time when they may recur.
Our personal dissatisfactions do not remain limited to
ourselves; instead, we keep sharing our suffering with others. In this way
individual tensions combine to create the tensions of society. This is the
basic problem of life; its unsatisfactory nature. Things happen that we do not
want; that we want do not happen. And we are ignorant of how and why this
process works, just as we are each ignorant of our own beginning and end.
We do not realize how harmful this ignorance is, how much we
remain the slaves of forces within ourselves of which we are unaware. Therefore the Buddha showed a path of
introspection, of self observation. The path is also a path of purification.
Because the problem originates in the mind, we must confront it at the mental
level. We must undertake the practice of Bhavana – literally mental development
or in common language Meditation”.
Other teachers and practitioners of meditation are many, and they all have their own articulation of the method. Although they all refer to both Tranquility and Insight meditation, the common thread of emphasis of all the teachers is Vippassana or insight meditation - the way to attain liberation through meditation. They all refer to attaining Samadhi - the one-pointed and concentrated mind- first, as this is a mind that can realize the truth and then encourages the meditator to shift to Vippassana thereafter for the full realization.
The above brief references to the work of these
great scholars of Buddhism do not do full justice to them or to the elaborate
content compiled by them in each of their discourses. However these extracts
were only presented to serve the purpose of giving the reader some inspiration
about meditation as practiced in Buddhism and motivate him/her to engage in the
practice.
I will share with you in the next Posts, my attempt at
extracting from these sources a practicable sequence on Buddhist meditation.
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